Mindfulness at Work

I was called away for a dental thing, though I'm much happier to be here today than sitting in a dentist's chair where I was last week. I hope all of you had a nice 4 July holiday. Maybe you got some time off of work. Maybe today, Monday is your first day back to work and you're adjusting to post vacation time. I'm with you. I feel you. Hey, speak wonder. Welcome. And hi, Denise, welcome to you as well. And Radza. Hi, nice to see you again. So I was thinking about this question that came up. Hi, Anna.

That came up for me last week with a, hey, Jules. Who came up with me last week with a corporate client. So I have an organization that I teach in, and one of the departments I was meeting with wanted to bring me in to start teaching in this other department, Lake Erie. Oh, sounds nice. And the department head who brought me in asked this question about mindfulness and whether mindfulness was really just Buddhism. Is it a spiritual practice? And it got me thinking about that a bit. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that with you today.

But first I want to talk about something. Croissants. So croissants, which I think everyone thinks of as this traditional kind of french pastry, right? Your ham and cheese on Croissant or your croissant in the morning. And everyone thinks of Paris and France when they think of croissants. I think a lot of people do anyway. But the thing about croissants is actually they were an austrian dessert. They were originally called Kipfel. K I P F e L. I think that's how you say it. Kipfel. And in around 1840.

Yes, yes, I know. I'm going to make everyone hungry today. Speak wonder. Around 1840, this baker from Austria named August Tsang, he moved to Paris and he opened a bakery, and he started baking croissants, what was then called croissants. It was really Kipfel. And they became this huge hit. Everyone wanted croissants. And it became so associated with french baking that people started to think, oh, croissants are french. And then this really cool thing happened in 2013, this chef in New York, his name was Dominique Ansel.

He took the croissant and he created something completely new. He created the cronuthe, and it took everybody by storm. Everyone was eating cronuts, and they basically were croissant doughnuts, right? It was a croissant dough, this flaky pastry, but cut into a circle with a hole in the middle and cooked like a doughnut. And then topped with awesome toppings. I was in New York at the time and remember kind of waiting in line to get a cronut, which was great. I mean, cronuts are awesome, but I don't know if it was worth mine for.

I don't think you have to wait in line for cronuts these days. But it was cool to see how this chef had kind of reinvented this pastry from France, which actually was this pastry from. Hi, Anna. Yeah, it does sound good. Which actually was this pastry from Austria, and I. This is mindfulness. So, mindfulness is based on traditional buddhist meditation practices. That's where it originated. And a saying is that the Buddha or Buddhism wrote the recipe, but it's our job to bake the bread every day or to bake the croissants every day.

And in that 25 century period between when Buddhism and these practices were created and formalized, a lot has happened. And in that time, what we've been able to observe is that there doesn't need to be a spiritual component to the practice at all in order for people to see real benefit from using mindfulness practices in their day to day life. So, yes, there is this historical context. We don't want to erase the people who created these practices and standardized these practices that now are part of the mindfulness community and mindfulness work that so many teachers are doing out there.

It's not fair to ignore that. And it's also okay to acknowledge that it is a secular practice now. And what is important about that, I think, and what was actually really important for me in order to make these practices accessible for me, because I wasn't someone who had a strong relationship to spiritual practice at the time, was that because mindfulness practices were standardized and programs like mindfulness based stress reduction, which was created by John Kabat Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Hospital in their stress clinic, because these protocols for using mindfulness practices were able to be standardized and made secular and delivered to many different types of people from different backgrounds with different life experiences, with different conditions, whether that be stress or chronic pain or anxiety or whatever the condition that brought them to the practice was, the practices were created and standardized, and then they could be studied because they were being delivered in a consistent way, that is, a surfboard in the background.

Speak, wonder. And because the practices could be delivered in a consistent way and could be measured, you could then start to measure the effectiveness of these practices versus other treatments. And in many cases, mindfulness practices have been proven to be as effective for stress management for dealing with symptoms of anxiety for helping with sleep, as some prescription medications have been. And I don't want to imply that anyone should stop their prescription medications if they're using, doing mindfulness practice, you know, consult with your doctor.

But because we were able to study the practices and see what worked and what wasn't working from a Yde clinical perspective, we could refine it. And I'm sure that's the same thing that Dominique Ansel had to do with his cronut, right? You can't just take the croissant pastry and all of a sudden slap some icing on it and call it a doughnut. There had to be some modifications, and there had to be a recipe that was created to create cronuts. And that's what we're doing every day in mindfulness. So that's what I wanted to share with you today.

That while there is this historical context that comes from a traditional buddhist tradition, the truth is that today mindfulness practice is a secular practice and accessible to all and not incompatible with anyone's faith or religious beliefs or background or cultural background. It's open to all and inclusive for all of. And that's something that's actually really exciting for me and hopefully for you. So if this question comes up, is this just Buddhism? No, it's not Buddhism anymore. Yeah, it started there, but now it's a whole different thing.

So I wish you the best in your practices. I could. I was just about to close this. It's funny. So I used to own a yoga studio. And at the end of classes, we used to often dedicate the merits of our practice to all sentient beings everywhere. And that is, of course, a spiritual practice. And that has a spirit, a specific spiritual connotation. And I remember I was teaching class, and I had someone that came to my class for months. Sorry, Anna. I just had this one extra story that just popped up. I had this student who came to class for months, and at the end of every class, I would say, dedicate the merits of our practice to all sentient beings everywhere.

And after several months, she came up to me one day after class and she said, you know, I loved class today, and I really loved the meditation at the end of our class. But I have this question. Why do we dedicate our practices to all centipedes everywhere? Why centipedes? And I realized that for months, she thought that I was dedicating all of our practices to centipedes instead of sentient beings. So as I'm thinking about making this a secular practice and realizing how important language is. Anyway, I hope that you all have a wonderful day, and may your practice be of benefit to all centipedes everywhere.

I. Thanks. Have a good one.